Xbox One verdict – console and controller hardware review

GameCentral gives the final word on Microsoft’s new console, including whether Kinect works, all the TV features, and the new gamepad.

Attempting to ‘review’ a console is of course madness. It was only slightly less so back when a console was a fixed slab of unchanging electronics, but now that new software updates can radically change a machine’s abilities in an instant it’s almost meaningless. Especially as Microsoft are keen to point out that there are more patches coming out every day and the debug Xbox One we’ve been playing for the last week or so is still not exactly the same as what will be available on launch day.

And yet of course there is so much to talk about, and we don’t mean a tedious and entirely pointless discussion of the machine’s innards. We know and care nothing about how the Xbox One works, only whether it does.

Of course at this stage, with Microsoft’s marketing machine in full effect, there are few surprises left to reveal about the new console. If you haven’t seen its dashboard and user interface in a video then you only need to look at Windows 8 or Windows Phone to get an idea of how it works. Although as controversial as the ‘Metro’ interface is on PCs the collection of oblong apps and buttons is actually relatively similar to the old Xbox 360 dashboard anyway.

The Xbox One is a lot quicker to use though, managing to switch on and get to the dashboard within 10 seconds. Every game has to be installed to some degree before it will work, the first time you use it, but it generally only takes about 30 seconds before you can start playing (while the complete install continues in the background). Some games do take longer than this though, Ryse: Son Of Rome is several minutes, so it remains to be seen which becomes the standard going forward.

As for the design of the hardware itself you’d have to say that the Xbox One is not a particularly attractive piece of kit. A large, heavy, brutish looking thing, the comparisons to an ’80s Betamax video recorder are understandable and hard to shake. The PlayStation 4 isn’t much better though and by coincidence both feature the same half-gloss, half-matt finish that makes them look more similar than they might otherwise have. Still, once it’s stuck under your TV none of that matters and the fact that it’s remarkably quiet for its size is a definite boon.

Xbox One’s multimedia dashboard

TV and entertainment

At first the Xbox One’s TV and entertainment features were promoted as heavily, if not more so, than its games. But just as was feared at the time they prove to be heavily biased towards the US in terms of not just the content, but the way that Americans watch and use television. For example, in order to make use of instantly switching between live TV and a game you need a set-top box with HDMI output and we just haven’t got that in the room we use for gaming.

We know the feature works but it’s not one we can use at home, and since Microsoft themselves have provided statistics showing that just over half of the country are in the same boat the specifics of the feature feel poorly thought and discriminatory.

Even just using online apps to access TV content is disappointing, since as you can see from this list of launch options the only major UK-only service featured is Channel 4’s 4oD. There’s no BBC iPlayer, no ITV, and most strangely of all no Sky – or any hint of its inclusion until well into next year. And apparently the much touted Live TV guide somehow doesn’t support either Sky TV or Freeview HD, which seems an absurd oversight.

On a more positive note though the Xbox One’s multitasking features are excellent, allowing you to create a split display between a game or movie that allows you to have an Internet Explorer web page or Skype connection taking up around a quarter of one side of the screen. This definitely feels next gen and you can really see how it would change the act of watching television for many people. Or at least when watching something you weren’t really that interested in, and wanted to do something else at the same time.

Skype itself is not something we’ve been able to test much so far as the 1080p video conferencing is something that only works ‘Kinect-to-Kinect’, i.e. with someone else that owns an Xbox One. The service as a whole is a useful addition to the Xbox One’s armoury though and again its easy to imagine free four-person video conferencing having a major effect on the way people communicate with each other in the future.

Meanwhile, Upload Studio has great potential for gaming, allowing you to automatically record, edit, and share videos of the games you play. The editing functions are pretty simple, but we suspect they’ll evolve over time and they’re already a clear step above anything possible on the current gen. The only sharing options at the moment are for SkyDrive, but once uploaded (after taking several minutes to ‘render’) you can then manually upload it to YouTube. Although again it’s surprising there’s no integrated Twitter or Facebook options.

Kinect – it listens but it only sometimes understands

Kinect

As with most gamers we were highly sceptical about Kinect being included with the Xbox One and for two obvious reasons: the first one doesn’t work and having the new one as standard significantly increases the price. Having played the Kinect at various previews over the last year though we became more enthusiastic, once we realised it was much more accurate and reliable as a controller. Now, having played around with it in a home environment, we’re back to being largely disinterested in it again.

Although to be fair the motion controls do still impress. We couldn’t even use the original Kinect in our normal home setting, due to the amount of space it needed, but it just so happens that the minimum of 1.4 meters the new Kinect (which hasn’t been given a specific name, oddly) needs is exactly the distance between our TV and the sofa.

The problem is though that very few games at the moment actually use motion controls, although pointing in Dead Rising 3 and using your hand as a cursor on the dashboard both work well. We do now have a dog pile of three sensors sitting beneath our TV though, the PlayStation Camera perched atop the larger Kinect, with the Wii sensor pushed to the background – waiting to be pulled out again if needed.

But while the motion controls have impressed at in the lead-up to the Xbox One’s launch (particularly in the yet to be released Kinect Sports Rivals, a demo of which is available from day one) the voice recognition has never seemed to work properly, either when used by us or demoed by other people. Various excuses have been offered for this by Microsoft but we can report that in the home environment we got no better than a 75 per cent success rate, sometimes much lower.

This percentage will vary significantly according to your accent, not to mention how much you tend to mumble, but we haven’t even tried any regional accents on it yet and it’s already this unreliable.

Many of the games make extensive use of optional voice-activated motion controls, but since everything can just as easily be accessed by using the controllers there’s no real advantage offered by Kinect. It’d be a few milliseconds faster if it always worked but it doesn’t and as a result we’ve largely given up using it already.

The new best controller ever?

Controller

Strangely the new Xbox One controller also doesn’t have a specific name, but then neither did the Xbox 360 one and that’s widely regarded as the best joypad ever made. There has been a lot of talk from Microsoft about how much more improved the new one is, but although there certainly are differences it’s still debatable how positive they are.

The most obvious change is perhaps the trigger buttons, which are now moulded as part of the top of the controller and feature a much more exaggerated curve for your index finger to sit in. At first the larger size and less resistive action makes the triggers feel rather hollow and insubstantial but you do get used to them and they certainly fit your hand very well.

We’re still not sure they’re an actual improvement though, and since this is the area the DualShock 4 has shown the most advancement in we can imagine many people preferring Sony’s controller in terms of that aspect at least.

The rest of the controller is a less controversial refinement of what already exists, with a much improved D-pad and the needlessly confusing renaming of the Select and Start buttons that has become a feature of this new generation. They’re now illustrated by indistinct looking symbols on Microsoft’s controller, despite the games confusingly referring to them as ‘Menu’ and ‘View’.

The contoured shape of the grips and matt finish of the controller still feel a lot more comfortable in your hands than Sony’s DualShocks, and the analogue sticks remain that little bit more precise. Although they are much taller than the new PlayStation joypad, which makes moving quickly between the two slightly odd.

One of the headline features of the new controller is meant to be the ‘impulse triggers’, new force feedback that runs throughout the length of the controller and is intended to provide the next generation of rumble. We’ve had tech demos of them at Microsoft HQ that do indeed feel impressively subtle and varied but so far none of the games we’ve reviewed have used them in any noticeable way. We’ve still got Forza Motorsport 5 and Ryse to go, but it’s odd the other game are desperate to use pointless Kinect controls but not this.

The Verdict

It’s still bizarre to think how badly Microsoft bungled the unveiling of the Xbox One but as predicted most ordinary customers are oblivious to those early mistakes and many gamers have long since forgiven them. But without that controversy actually playing around with the Xbox One at home proves to be a slightly underwhelming experience. Not because there’s anything wrong with it but because at the moment it really doesn’t do that much more than a current gen console.

Even if the live TV features do work in your home the range of useful entertainment apps is noticeably less than the Xbox 360. Features such as Skype, the split-screen views, and Upload Studio are definitive positives though, and rather than the TV options it’s concepts like this that are likely to define the console’s non-gaming features in the future.

And even if we’re not impressed by Kinect’s voice recognition the sensor is not the white elephant it could’ve been, and we are genuinely interested to see how it’ll be used in the future.

We’re more interested in the games though and, as ever, that should really be your only consideration when buying a new console. After all, we’re sure many other devices beyond the Xbox One will attempt to redefine how you watch television and communicate with friends over the coming lifetime of Microsoft’s new console. (Consider that when the Xbox 360 launched the iPhone and iPad didn’t even exist.)

But only a dedicated console such as the Xbox One will be able to shape the future of video games. And in that sense we’re hugely excited by what the Xbox One can do now and, more importantly, what games it will play host to in the future.

The Xbox One is released on November 22 for a suggested retail price of £429. Retail games cost between £49.99 and £54.99, and currently all paid-for downloadable titles are £15.99 each.